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On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 06:30:15 GMT, Guy Alcala
wrote: Ed Rasimus wrote: That would be tempered by time-to-go to TOT and distance read out on the INS. The escorts would be trying to keep 420 indicated which was an approximation of corner velocity. Wouldn't they want some extra E over corner, because they'd be bound to **** it off quickly with any hard maneuvering? It's always going to be a compromise between what you want and what you can have. In any A/A mission I always like to be very fast at entry--in those days you could bleed off airspeed a lot easier than gain it (not so for most aircraft today!) In the escort role, the constraint was to maintain station on the escorted force. So, with a bit of maneuver you could hold near corner and plan on having a minute or two to accelerate upon getting a Disco call or hearing of a MiG spotting somewhere in the package. Worst case would be as the intercept target with no warning. C/L tanks would be gone as soon as they got empty, so first move would be a slice into the attack with full reheat, then a conversion of the fight into a vertical rather than horizontal engagment. MiGCAP suprisingly orbited slower than escorts usually depending upon GCI vectoring to give them acceleration and configuration time (tank jettison). Sweep missions would be faster than corner from the time they hit the Red River flatlands. No way to get to that speed at that altitude. I'd readily accept 1.2M, but can't imagine getting to 1.6 and would really find it tactically a mistake to get going that fast even if you could. Okay, although since he was rear aspect on the MiGs who seem to have been doing their usual supersonic (or at least, high transonic) missile pass and blow through, being well above transonic would seem to be necessary if he was going to catch them. It would certainly give his AIM-7 a better chance of overhauling them. Do you ever see him at Rats reunions? If so, maybe you could ask him about it. Attendance at Rat reunions seems, at least to me, to be more weighted toward earlier participants and definitely toward multiple tour guys. I don't see that many from the Korat Linebacker days. Haven't seen either of these guys since 1973. Well, we had been talking about the F-4E portion of the Hunter/Killer team and the carriage of dual pods. My original point was that some equipment like ECM pods and AIM-7s were standard throughout the squadron and not adjusted for the particular role of a tail number on a particularl day--hence, H/Ks carried a pod even if we weren't going to use it. No argument there. I still don't know how I easily managed to find shots of two different 34th TFS a/c (as well as one from the 421st) carrying two pods in that era, if it was as unusual as you state. Just one more minor mystery that's unlikely to be solved. 421st F-4s were never (at least to my knowledge) at Korat. The war lasted a long time and the only consistency was constant change. I can only report on what I encountered from July of '72 to July of '73 at Korat. I pointed out the minor error in Jenkin's quote that you offered regarding emphasis on a pod for Iron Hand applications. snip I think we're talking past each other here. My point was that the higher commanders/people who wrote the requirement for the ALQ-101 very likely* did so for exactly the reasons Jenkins claimed, i.e. to provide better protection for a/c that weren't able to benefit from mutual jamming. Subsequent priority deployment of the ALQ-101 to those a/c tasked with such detached missions, i.e. Iron Hand/MiGCAP/Recon, indicates that Jenkins' comments about the perceived need for the development of the 101, _regardless of whether it was actually turned on by the crews_, is correct. *I say "very likely" because I don't have Jenkins here, and don't know what his sources were for this statement, if he gave them. Offhand, I don't recall seeing photos of a/c other than F-105WW or MiGCAPs carrying ALQ-101s from 1968-1973, although it may have happened. But even if there are some shots of same, the vast majority of photos I have of strikers/chaffers/escorts during LB I/II show them carrying pure noise jamming pods, and not ALQ-101s. I don't think I have a single photo of a 388th F-4E carrying an ALQ-101 during the bombing halt and LB periods. Whew, what a load of my senile mind! That's consistent with my recollection of Korat in '72-3. I don't recall the big ALQ-101 until I arrived at Torrejon and we had them with the F-4Cs that we received in October of '73 when the E-models were realigned at Bitburg. We carried them for about 2 years and then began getting a few of the ALQ-119 pods. I know that the 388th had them when they were still equipped with Thuds, because there's a photo in Larry Davis' "Wild Weasel", taken at Korat, of a whole rack of ALQ-101s waiting to be loaded on a/c, with Thud tails visible above the revetments in the background. Davis book is hard to reference since it isn't indexed, but I did find the section you refer to. The pods are noted as arriving in July of '68 (which is about the time of cessation of NVN bombing and the end of Rolling Thunder.) Tony Thornborough in "Iron Hand" notes the 7AF demand for carriage of pods and the Weasel's resistance because of both interference with RHAW equipment and loss of a Shrike station. It should be noted as well that not all two-seat aircraft at Korat by 1968 were Weasels. There were Ryan's Raider aircraft, Combat Nail, T-Stick II, etc. Some of these might have had good applications of the -101 pod, if they were going to SAM country. Presumably there were only limited numbers of -101s available in the theater, so if those pods weren't at the 388th in 1972 they must have been somewhere else. From photo evidence it appears that "somewhere else" was the 432nd at Udorn, the unit tasked with MiGCAP and Recon over the north, which is right in line with the intended deployment of the -101 described by Jenkins (the F-105Gs had their own " -101s" by this time, the ALQ-105). Along that line, I could only find a single shot of a 67th TFS F-4CWW carrying a pod, and it's an -87. The sample size is way too small to reach any definite conclusions, but I'd guess that there may not have been enough 101s to go around. The 67th was apparently tasked to do a lot of pre-emptive Shrike firings, which would have kept them out of the worst threats. Alternatively, Davis has illustrations showing them carrying ALQ-119s, which may have been just entering service at the time. The F-4Cs at Spangdahlem carried -119s a few years later, but I don't know when they became available. When the 67th deployed to Korat for Linebacker II, they were barely operational. Only the need for additional 24-hour/day Weaseling made it necessary to deploy them to the war. Higher priority missions in SEA would have kept the Kadena guys from getting the latest equipment. I don't know about pre-emptive Shrike firings. I never heard of it during a lot of Weasel supporting. The first I recall consideration of the tactic was several years later (around '75-'76) when Shrike supply levels had stabilized and there were sufficient numbers to expand in that manner. Unless you had a very tight, single-thrust, strike package on a very explicit timeline, I think it would be pretty hard to safely coordinate a pre-emption program. Ed Rasimus Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret) "When Thunder Rolled" www.thunderchief.org www.thundertales.blogspot.com |
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